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Austintown schools working on new wetlands for those displaced by new AMS building
By ROBERT CONNELLY
AUSTINTOWN
Austintown schools will not have an auction for the old Davis Elementary site off Maple Drive. The site might be used instead to create wetlands.
That’s because the school district still needs to account for 2 acres of wetlands after it failed a five-year wetlands assessment.
The wetlands section that failed an Ohio Environmental Protection Agency assessment is off Davis Drive on the current Austintown schools campus.
It is part of the wetlands the school district had to create to replace those taken away by the new campus construction.
The new Austintown Middle School was built above the once-in-a-500-year flood level of a nearby stream, known as Axe Factory Run.
Superintendent Vincent Colaluca said the district failed its five-year assessment two or three years ago on its wetlands mitigation and has since been working with the Ohio EPA.
“Sometimes the wetlands, just for whatever reason – something about the environment that they’re put in – just kind of don’t develop,” said Linda Oros, spokeswoman for the Northeast District of the Ohio EPA.
She said that there are two types of cattail plants that are not native on the schools campus that “were kind of taking over, or not the native species that are needed to establish a wetland.”
Oros also said that there also is more open water than planned which indicated “that the wetland is just not establishing as far as the plant life.”
“If [the Davis Elementary property off Maple] is already established as a wetland, it’s a little easier to start from nothing to make it work. They may be thinking that their chances for a successful mitigation are higher,” she said.
Mal Culp, Austintown schools’ supervisor of facilities and operations, said that “the north part of Davis is already wetlands.”
Colaluca further said the school district is looking at having some other entity take care of its wetlands, due to the cost of fixing those wetlands on campus.
“It takes a lot of money to sustain” wetlands, he said, which is why he wants the effort to be run by another entity.
The Davis property still has to be evaluated for sustainability, but the district could “then look at moving all wetlands off of our [campus] property. This is a long-standing process and we have to work with the EPA on this,” he said.
Culp and Colaluca said Mill Creek MetroParks is an organization that could take over responsibility of its wetlands, but Mill Creek planning and natural resources director Steve Avery said he had not been contacted by the schools.
“I would say generally the answer would be no because there’s no connection with us [the MetroParks] at all because they’re going to have to build something,” Avery said of absorbing the wetlands into the parks system. “Totally independent of us.”
Colaluca said the schools have been in talks with a nonprofit organization that specializes in wetlands, but no formal contract has been signed with that organization.
If things do work out with that group, Colaluca said a contract could be signed in the spring or summer.
The issue of wetlands on the campus came up during the campaign in May 2014 for the new Fitch High School levy.
The new Fitch would have been built on existing wetlands while students still attended the current building, 4560 Falcon Drive.
Once construction was done at the new high school, the current building would have been demolished.
By doing construction this way, students would not have had to attend school in temporary trailers on the school district’s campus.
By taking all the wetlands off the main campus and onto an exterior site, such as the old Davis property, that would lead the way for that same new Fitch plan to be used in the future.
“One day this community will definitely have to rebuild Fitch ... it looks OK, but it’s not a viable option,” Colaluca said.
“Could be 10 years from now, could be five years from now” for a new Fitch, he said.
The superintendent continued, “... We have to deal with [the wetlands] but we have to deal with it in the best way and deal with the immediate future and the future down the road.”
The district will have an auction on the remainder of the old building sites of Lloyd on Norquest Boulevard and Woodside on Elmwood Drive.
Both vary between 9 and 12 acres.
There also is a 5-acre district-owned property on Woodridge Drive near Lynn-Kirk Elementary School, 4211 Evelyn Road.
Those sites were cleared and left with open grass fields after the buildings were demolished when the new schools were built on one campus.
Culp said the public auction for those sites could take place before this Thanksgiving.